I first started this blog due to "popular demand" for me to to share my cooking and quilting results in blog form as it was easier for friends and people who know me to see what I'm up to, especially compared to just an image hosting site. Now I blog because I enjoy sharing what I do and hope that I do in some way inspire people to try new things out as well.

Friday, 31 January 2014

My dear
friend Carla is holding her own SAL: "2014: The Year of the Magnificent
Teresa Wentzler" and she inspired me to also make something of TW -
something I've never done before and completely out of my comfort zone.

I decided to do Futurecast as that pattern gave me the most scope
to choose colours that I liked and avoid the dreaded pinks and purples. I
didn't have that many variegated threads that had more than one colour in them
and decided in the end to use DMC 4010 for it as I liked the pale blues, greys.
beiges and umm yeah there was a bluish purple in there too lol.

It took me 2 days to choose all the colours I wanted to use, though I would
have preferred to avoid the purples, I soon realised that the greys were going
to be too similar to the other colours to show up much so I decided on using
the pale blue as my colour group 1 starting colour, pale beige as my colour
group #2 colour and the purple as the third group. I ended up using silver as
the metallic and pearlescent white as the other colour even though I was
originally planning it the other way round.

These are the colours I ended up using:

My main colour group was blue with the inspiration colour being 162 - I chose
813, 826, and 827 as the other 3 colours in the colour group.
My secondary colour was creamish - I chose 3866 as the colour and 3782 as the
medium colour to go with it.
My tertiary colour was greyish purple, with 159 as the light and 160 as the
darker shade to go with it.
My metallic is E168 (silver)
The crystal ball was done in pearlescent E5200
Back stitching around the silver was mostly done with silver thread except
around the wings where I used 826, which is also the colour I used for the back
stitching around the blue of the dragon. I used 3782 around all the secondary
colour stitches and 160 around the third colour stitches.

Having picked the colours and carefully looked at the pattern I realised that
using my usual 18ct Aida was not going to cut it due to the 1/2 cross stitches
it had - though it's possible to do them on Aida it's no fun trying to guess
the middle of a bunch of threads on such a small scale and then hoping that it
looks ok. I decided to see what else I still had lurking in my drawer and box.
I rediscovered the lovely pale green/blue splotched overdyed 28 ct Lugana that
Carla had sent me as a prize many moons ago and after some careful auditioning
decided that it would look lovely.

As I'm a fabric miser I carefully measured the amount of fabric needed for the
project and realised that if I cut my piece in half I would have exactly enough
for this project and still have some leftover for another project, which in my
book is a perfect solution.

Although
I was determined to wait until I'd finished the border of my 8th century floor
tile before starting the dragon I just couldn't wait so I chucked it aside and
started it on the second day of the IHSW. I got quite a bit done that day as,
for the most part, the pattern wasn't as daunting as I'd feared.

I decided to take photos of the project every day and make a blog post but
sadly I never got round to the blog posts as I was too busy with life and
stitching. Fortunately I DID make a photo every day so there are progress shots
of it. I decided to make them into a single .gif with the shots so you can see
them all at high(ish) speed.

I had
quite a bit of trouble with the pattern as it turned out - some of it was due
to not being used to doing 1/2 cross stitches and I'd get confused where I was
supposed to put them and where they were supposed to nest with each other and
other stitches - some I spotted on time and fixed - some I only found out about
later and if it didn't look off I left them as it was.

I also discovered about half way through that the back foot was a stitch short
- as I’d worked down from the leg to the foot and then along the tail to the
left and I didn't want to remove a good 50 stitches I decided that having the
foot a stitch short was bearable, though it did make doing the foot a bit more
difficult later on.

I then realised that I'd made an even bigger goof with the end of the tail -
I'd managed to get it 1/2 a stitch off height wise and didn't noticed till I'd
almost completed all the silver stitches along the back. Here again I didn't
want to deal with so much frog stitching and decided to make it work - and as
you can see I did!

The backstitching took a bit of thought as I worked but overall I'm happy with
how I decided to highlight the colours I used.

For the beads I made a special trip to the lovely treasure hoard in Eindhoven
which is so stuffed with crafty things that people can barely move. I found the
perfect silver beads to use along his back and also found some blue that
exactly matched DMC 826. I also picked up some white beads thinking that they
too might look good.

While I was in the shop I had a look at the embroidery fabric and found a nice
brownish linen that was almost finished - sadly the bolt did not admit to what
it was but I later found out that it is a 25 ct linen. End of bolt pieces
are good to take to measure as we all know and after having a chat with the guy
who owns the shop and telling him that I'd come all the way specially to go to
his shop he was nice and gave me what was just 1 cm less than a meter for 75
cm's worth (a meter is 36 inches so I got 35,5 inches for the price of 27
inches) a great deal! I was also tempted by the threads as I had wished that
I'd had more colour s to choose from so I completed my collection of the 40XX
series and got myself all of the other colours. Fortunately I'd had to baby sit
for my ex one night of his kid’s weekend and I had some extra cash burning a
hole in my pocket so I was able to splurge for a change.

I ended
up using the silver beads in the border as well as along his back as I found
that the lovely blue ones were too big and the white ones were too small - a
typical goldilocks situation.

The completed embroidery looks like this:

And I
will be using it as the front of my diary cover for this year - as soon as I've
decided which colour to use for the back, spine and inner side of the cover.